The Thalidomide Scandal and the Forgotten Role of Enoch Powell

The government has confirmed today that it is to apologize at last to thalidomide victims for their suffering. It will add £20 million to the depleted compensation fund, which was established for victims in the 1970s following a long court battle. Stretching back to 1958 — when the drug was first prescribed to mothers suffering from morning sickness in pregnancy — thalidomide is one of the worst public health and political scandals in Britain’s recent history.

The drug should never have been given the go-ahead for public use because the claims made for it had not been adequately tested. It caused babies to be born with foreshortened limbs, or no limbs at all, and others were born blind and deaf. In Britain more than 400 children were affected, with another 10,000 in other countries.

The story is recounted in Harry Evans brilliant memoirs — a beautifully written account of his journey from northern boyhood, through local newspapers, university and on to the editorships of the Northern Echo, the Sunday Times and the Times.

Associated Press

Enoch Powell, then the Conservative Party defense spokesman, listens to two demonstrators protesting his speech in England when he said that Britain must be mad to allow an annual influx of 50,000 immigrants into the country.

Evans was a campaigning editor who took up the cause of the thalidomide victims and stuck with it. His old paper, The Sunday Times, carried an extract on the fight last autumn which is gripping stuff.

It explains how, disgracefully, from the off in the early 1960s the department of health set about blocking attempts by parents to secure an inquiry and compensation. Who was the particularly intransigent minister of health involved? One Enoch Powell.

Evans writes of his role:

“In all the attention paid to the thalidomide story, Powell’s crucial role in the long nightmare has been neglected. He was a baffling figure who ricocheted from the impeccably lucid to the paranoid crazy… Like many I was puzzled by the loose screw that turned Powell’s brilliance corrosively inward. That he refused to help the dispirited and powerless thalidomide families is hard to understand or forgive.

He had received a delegation of affected parents in January 1963 and rejected their every request. No to a public inquiry on the origins of the disaster. No to immediately setting up a drug-testing centre — “anyone who takes an aspirin puts himself at risk”. No to a public warning against using any of the thalidomide pills that might still be in medicine cabinets — “a scaremonger publicity stunt”. No to giving a statement after the meeting — “no need to bring the press into this”. And no to his setting eyes on a thalidomide child.

It was an extraordinary lapse of public duty to deny society the knowledge essential to understanding the tragedy’s origins and preventing anything similar happening again. Powell’s intransigence left the families with only one remedy: to sue the manufacturers for negligence… (Powell) then put the whole weight of the ministry behind discountenancing the very grounds of negligence they’d have to prove to win damages. Thalidomide, he said in parliament and in a television interview, was properly tested by Distillers according to the standards of the time, when nobody thought a drug could reach the foetus.”

Powell was plain wrong; it hadn’t been tested properly but he refused to listen or even keep an open mind. His heartless approach to the scandal lengthened the legal battle parents were forced to fight and exacerbated the distress of the victims. But then stubbornness and a degree of vanity were part of the Powell stock in trade.

What a puzzling human being he was. Intellectually highly gifted — the youngest Professor in the Commonwealth at 25. A good soldier, he was a formidable staff officer in WWII and one of the very few who rose from the rank of private to brigadier between 1939 and 1945. He was a bold thinker on free-market economics and in this well ahead of his time in Britain. But he was just terrible at politics, wrong on race, self-obsessed and destined to self-destruct when he grappled foolishly with the sensitive subject of immigration.

“Enoch Powell’s political career was far more complex than the taxi-driver version would suggest. But there is one obvious conclusion to be drawn. Throughout the decades, Enoch was locked in his own selfishness. He was incapable of playing in a team or displaying loyalty to the captain. He was always far more of a narcissist than a politician.”